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Milgram (12marks)
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Milgram (12marks)Proma
Milgram conducted a study in order to understand under what conditions people
obey the authority. He investigated this at a university by advertising that wanted to
see how punishment influenced learning. Therefore, Milgram made use of volunteer
sampling. Participants were also paid $4.50. The participants were 40 males
between the ages of 20 and 50. The victim (the learner) was a confederate and
gave many wrong answers deliberately in order to carry out Milgram's experiment.
The experimenter wore a lab coat and this made him appear authoritative. The
learner was strapped to and electric shock machine. The machine that was placed
in front of the participant, who carried out the role of the teacher, was a shock
generator. The learner was hidden from the teacher by a partition and the teacher
was told to administer an electric shock every time the learner go the wrong
answer. The voltage of the shocks would increase by small amounts. The highest
level of the shock was called "danger severe shock". The responses of the learner
were pre-recorded and were played once the voltage level reached 300V when the
learner banged on the wall or moaned in pain. Milgram found that most participants
would go right to the very top of the shock board if some pressure was exerted by
the authority figure. 65% of the participants gave the maximum amount of shocks
whereas only 5/40 participants stopped at 300V. Therefore, from this experiment
Milgram could conclude, that people would obey an authoritative figure even when
doing things that are clearly morally wrong.
Milgram also conducted his experiment in different situational variations to find
similar results. For example, obedience rate was the highest at 92% when another
"teacher" administers shocks on participants. Therefore, participants obeyed when
someone else was carrying out the experiment. The obedience rate was the lowest
at 10% when 2 confederates who were other "teachers" along with the participant
rebelled before 225V. This therefore shows that participants go along with the
majority even when there is an authoritative figure influencing them.
Milgram's experiment has some ethical issues. One ethical issue of the study is that
participants were deceived as they were deliberately given a false aim and
therefore they were being misled. This Is unethical because deception may cause
participants stress or other types of damage as it is considered morally
unacceptable for a psychologist to mislead the participants. Another ethical issue
was that the participants didn't give informed consent as the participants didn't
agree to take part in the actual experiment and therefore this may be seen as
insulting to them as they were taken part in a study without their permission.
A strength of the Milgram study is that it is reliable. It was a lab experiment and a
controlled study therefore most the variables were controlled. In addition, Milgram's
procedures have been replicated in other countries and obedience rates were still
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